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Following is the text presented at the American Library Association's Midwinter Conference Saturday January 21, 8:30 am at the Dallas Convention Center Theater by Occupy Wall Street Librarians Daniel Norton, Mandy Henk, Betsy Fagin, Jaime Taylor and Zachary Loeb.
Good Morning ALA Midwinter 2012 Dallas! My name is Daniel Norton, I am a student of Library Science, and I am both proud and honored to introduce to you a group of professionals who have not only impacted me in very meaningful ways as a future professional, but who have an inspiring and interesting story to share with you today…
On September 17th of last year a group of committed activists, activists diverse in age, race, and social class, taking their inspiration from the Arab Spring, "occupied" a public space in New York City's financial district. They rejected the legitimacy of the existing authorities and engaged in direct action to build a new and better world. A world based on old principles. Principles embedded deep in the American psyche, but lately forgotten. Solidarity. Mutual aid. Equality. Autonomy. Democracy—real democracy based on consensual, non-hierarchical self-governance. The activists of Occupy Wall Street built a People's Kitchen so that no one need know hunger. They built a Comfort station so that no one need suffer the cold. Medical care, Arts and Culture, a Spirituality Space, even a phone charging station . . . .all of the necessities of life—including a library. Occupy Wall Street is about creating a new and better world ourselves. As a free people united for justice.
Occupiers have faced repeated police brutality—peaceful Occupiers have been arrested, maced, gassed, attacked with police scooters and sound canons. On November 15th, our occupation and our library were destroyed in a brutal early morning raid. Our colleagues and comrades were arrested, our collection tossed into a dumpster, our tent cut apart with a chainsaw. But we are here, we are strong, and we are committed to the fight for justice. We are the Librarians of Occupy Wall Street and we are committed to using the tools of our profession–books, literacy, bibliographic control, reference and readers advisory in that fight. As librarians we understand the vital role libraries play in society and in a healthy democracy and our library stands as our living commitment to that fulfilling that role.
We're each going to give a brief reflection and then we'll have a presentation on our library and time for questions.
One of the unique characteristics of Occupy is how it is a very local expression of a group of people in any particular place, but the impulse to build a library, to share knowledge and resources is universal.
In November there was a brief article in the Guardian with a slide show of other Occupy Libraries in Washington DC, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Toronto and London that gave us one of our first glimpses of how Occupy libraries were multiplying.
The Biblioteca Acampada Sol in Madrid that grew out of the M15 movement has been a particular inspiration to us & I want to read some of a letter they sent to us in early October as it mirrors our own experience at Occupy Wall Street and expresses some of how we are bound together whether we know it or not:
Cheers from the public library of the Spanish revolution occupation at Madrid!
We are the Acampada Sol Library, The library that was formed during the occupation of the Puerta del Sol Square here in Madrid- Spain last May. We have been following OWS from the very first day and let's say we are glad to see that you found the way out to organise you up almost in the same way we did while we were camping at the city hall square in Madrid at Puerta del Sol.
What we saw [in] the pics of OWS was quite impressive, but you couldn't imagine how surprised we were when we realized that OWS has also a library. It may sound stupid but when we knew that, we celebrated it as the born of a new one in the family.
Why? well, it´s difficult to explain but during the nearly seven weeks we lived there hearing the rain fall over the piece of plastic that barely covered our books (not us) we had a lot of time to think about what we were going trough. The media described us as bums, the government as the most dangerous kind of terrorists (the pacifist's kind) and we slept always waiting for the final police riot that would throw everything down. We had time for joy and also for despair. We never knew what we were doing, we only knew that it was right. People said it was useless to demand a U-turn in local politics in a country with a globalized economy. We replied if so, that we expected to make our demands go global then, they said it was a childish dream and they laughed…
We only want to thank all of you to be there, because maybe you don't realize it, but you're making our dream come true… Obviously to do the right thing, far from being a utopia or related to culture is a matter of common sense.
We should say that none of us decided to open up a library during our occupation, it appeared by itself. People who came to support us wanted us to have some of their books, they wanted us to read and to take care of them. We started out only with forty titles. People came up to rest from the everyday routines, trying to find a shelter in the written words under our blue tent, poets showed up to read them their works and free thinkers their essays…The manager of one major corporate library in town gave us book-carts and everything we needed. "Just don't tell anyone" he asked. One donation come after another and in a few weeks we reached nearly four thousands titles at our outdoor library. A funny heritage to save considering that we were waiting to be bludgeoned and evicted from one minute to other…
We love to hear from you to know how all of you guys are going and we hope you'll find inspiration in our little story to realise that you are not alone in this.
Thank You!
Pd[sic]: Sorry for our lousy English.
Bibliosol – Biblioteca de Acampada Sol
During the time we held the park, we were so busy organizing and running the library, arranging events, talking to people & trying to evade arrest that we didn't have much opportunity to reach out beyond Zuccotti Park. Since the raid, connecting Occupy libraries together has become one of our primary aims.
We are still in the early stages of forming a consortium of Occupy libraries (& if anyone would like to get involved, please get in touch with me), but have already been in touch with libraries that are still active despite many of the camps being shut down. As of today, we've had enthusiastic response from about a dozen libraries and we are beginning to share our experiences and resources to strategize future steps and clarify the roles of libraries within the Occupy Movement. One particularly exciting development has been the role our library can play assisting educators. Many college professors have begun teaching courses on Occupy and who better to help them find accurate, timely information than the libraries and librarians who have been there.
I want to make it very clear that the People's Library is not like most other libraries. Most libraries, at least those in places like the United States, have walls and roofs and doors and shelves. They have regular electricity, bathrooms, call numbers, hours of operation. They don't have, for the most part, rain and snow inside them, or giant papier mâché bulls on Sunday afternoons, or constant police presence and the threat of arrest or violence that comes with it. Your library has probably never had anything to do with a tent, nor is anyone living in it, and while some of you have had the occasional visit from the authorities, your disaster plans don't stipulate what to do when hundreds of cops come calling, tear down the whole thing, and arrest anyone inside. Let me also be clear that none of this is hyperbole.
One aspect I particularly want to touch on is the decision-making process we use. The Library Working Group works on consensus. When I was in library school, we talked about horizontal structures and consensus as a cutting edge way of organizing library work and staff. Please throw that all out the window. Please. The meaning of 'consensus' used in my library school classroom and the meaning of it at the Occupation and in radical politics generally are not the same. For us, consensus requires that nearly everyone support a decision. If there are people with serious concerns about a proposal, what we call a 'block,' we need at least 90% those present to be in support of it. Degreed librarians have no more weight in making decisions than an 18-year-old college student, an underemployed actress, or a crusty traveling kid. At the same time, individual librarians are empowered to act autonomously to a large extent; if a librarian had a good idea, and an action wouldn't greatly affect the library as a whole, that person was welcome to make it happen, barring serious concerns from others, without seeking permission as such. The flip side of that autonomy is that an individual librarian need not involve themself with a library project they don't like or agree with, that in Occupation terms they 'stand aside' from. This is in severe contrast to even the flatter organizational structures in normal libraries, which are remain hierarchies and for which we might say about consensus, 'you keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.'
When formulating policies and procedures for the Library, we considered not only library best practices, but also the ideological nature of our existence, and the unique practical realities of our operations.
There are some aspects of the Occupy Wall Street Library that are easily recognizable: we have an OPAC of sorts on LibraryThing; we have master's degree holding librarians doing library work, as well as what could be termed paraprofessionals, techies, and friends of the library; we have books and -had- computers.
Our OPAC, as I've said, is on LibraryThing. We already had several hundred books when the catalog began, and so we retroactively cataloged everything in the collection at that point, and then cataloged new arrivals as they came in. Some books were added through barcode scanning, but most were done by searching the ISBN. Chapbooks, older books, and other items without ISBNs were cataloged by hand. We'd then mark the books as having been received and cataloged. At times when we didn't have available internet–which is often– we'd write down ISBNs and enter them into LibraryThing when internet was again available.
For most of the library's existence, we didn't have actual shelves. The first volumes were placed on a stone bench at the northeast corner of the park. Then they were put is cardboard boxes. Which melted in the rain. Then they were covered by tarps and put in plastic bins. Sometimes the bins could be on the bench and the ledge above it, sometimes the cops told us they couldn't be. Very often– especially when it was raining– we were told we couldn't cover them with tarps. You know, because we might be hiding bombs under there. Or something. So we got clear plastic sheeting instead. Which was acceptable slightly more often than the opaque tarps. But, back to shelving…
Our books don't have call numbers, and therefore don't have exact locations. They were broadly sorted in to categories and topics — fiction and non-fiction, non-print, history, economics, poetry, education, women, queer, people of color, non-English, etc. We performed what I liked to call "directly democratic shelving." That is, whoever was sorting books was empowered to put items where they thought they best belonged. And then if someone found a book in a certain place, but they thought it might be better elsewhere, they were welcome to move it. Personally, and as I would suggest to anyone who asked for advice on shelving, I tried to keep the principle of use in mind. If I was of more than one mind about where a book might belong, I'd consider where our readers might think to look for it, if they wanted that particular book. Or, I'd think about what section they'd be delighted to find it under. Use says that it goes where it will be most and most happily read.
The LibraryThing catalog is a record of the books that have ever been a part of the collection. It does not reflect what might be actually available in the library at any given moment. Circulation is one of the places where ideology and practically met harmoniously. Given that our library in Zuccotti Park had no building, no call numbers, and no library cards, we did not track circulation. Like maintaining a strict shelving order, it would have been nearly impossible to do, and certainly beyond the person-power at our disposal. There was never a formal method of borrowing and returning books. The only method was to find a book you wanted to read, pick it up, and walk off with it. We asked only that the reference collection, which included traditional reference materials such as dictionaries as well as copies of our most popular books– Howard Zinn's People's History, for example, not leave the library. Returns are most welcome, but not required. Readers are welcome to pass books along to friends, take them to other Occupations, or hold on to them. We suggest that somehow, though, the book continue to be used.
This method, aside from being practical, given our resources, was ideologically sound. First in mind is that we are the People's Library. The librarians are caretakers and facilitators. Also, the library was created in a climate of surveillance and a growing police state. Many libraries are very careful about how they keep records and who has access to those records; we circumvented the point by never keeping any. The only way anyone might ever know who read what book would be to see them doing it.
Lastly, there is no collecting policy. Or, rather, there is, and it only has two points: everything we have was donated to us, and we accept everything. We buy supplies, but we never buy books. Every single volume is in the library because some person thought it should be. And we though many of us have disdain for some authors or viewpoints, or the quality of some literature– and being readers as well as librarians, it's our movement, too, after all, are welcome to say so– we never recycled a book on account of its content. This means that not only was the Library for the people, but, as they are responsible for its creation, that it is of the people.
The People's Library represents a collection of thousands upon thousands of books, it ranges across all genres, publication dates, and target audiences. To date over 9,000 books have been cataloged in our group's LibraryThing – and this is a number which is probably several thousand books lower than the true number of books that have come through the library. While the number of books is impressive in terms of quantity and variety, what makes it truly remarkable is that it is a collection built almost entirely by the library's patrons (we received some generous donations from publishers).
Books would get placed in the donation box and we would process them: mark them OWSL (or stamp them, back when we had the stamp), write down the ISBN number, sticker them so we knew the volume was "processed," and shelve them. When we were asked "how does this work?" (Which we were asked constantly), we replied: "it's a library. Take a book, read it, bring it back, or lend it to a friend, so that the library keeps spreading."
In the library we were commonly asked "what books do you need?" To which we typically responded: "what do you think we need?" or "what book changed your life?" or "Whatever you want to give." Although, at a certain point we added to the third response, "but we don't really need more fiction." True, the library was built by a steady flow of fiction (popular and classics), but the library sections most heavily perused and borrowed from were: politics, history, biographies, philosophy, ecology, and spirituality. It is a, shall we say, diverse collection. Our collection was as varied as the library's patrons, who – after all – built the collection. We have Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes. We have Ayn Rand and George Orwell. We have Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and Ann Coulter. We have Howard Zinn, Frances Fox Piven, Naomi Klein, and Noam Chomsky. We also have Stephen King, William Shakespeare, Dr. Seuss, and a book by the library's star patron Michael Bloomberg. We built a reference collection of books that were highly demanded (based largely on request) and F.A. Hayek was in there right next to Karl Marx…though we probably should have known better than to ask people not to remove the reference copy of "Steal this book."
Due to the ever changing nature of the collection, it could be quite the challenge to help patrons find books, but in the process it provided a real look into what brought people to the occupation. Working in the library involved: searching for books to fit a lot of bizarre requests, listening to a lot of life stories, getting to know the regulars and their book tastes, being yelled at for random things, tidying, processing a ton of books, doing data entry, it was a lot like…working in a library.
Disregarding personal opinion on the matter, Occupy Wall Street, as well as other occupations worldwide, are happening, and they're inspiring discourse, debate, interest in political spheres and a renewed sense of the power that knowledge holds. The unifying theme of the occupy movement is dissatisfaction, and the result of people gathering to take part in the democratic process of their nation is a rekindling of interest in the early ideas and protections afforded us by our forefathers. This is America, and we The People are our own government. With the ubiquity of information access via the Internet, and the perception that people have the power to access knowledge that suits their needs, what is it that a library affords a populace? A place of community, sharing, conversation and insight. Libraries unite through educational outreach and conservation of those aspects of ourselves and society that represent our culture. What the People's Library has afforded her patrons is a place to engage with what's happening in our country, a means to contribute their own sentiments through the donation of materials, and the literacy to see other view points, perhaps form one of their own, and to express criticisms in an effective way. I've heard vicious and unapologetically ignorant statements made about the work being done here, even from members of this professional community, and it needs to be recognized that not everyone has the luxury of camping out in Liberty Plaza in order to take a stand, not everyone agrees with the tactics of the Occupy movement, but far more people than is represented are dissatisfied, feeling victimized or are otherwise feeling unfulfilled by the present state of our world, and they've chosen the library as a place of solace, and as a means of joining the conversation. The People moved to create a central place of collaboration and equal representation, and (of all things) they built a library as a symbol of such legitimacy.
What does this mean for librarianship? I believe that there is much to be learned from an organizational structure that eschews traditional approaches to educating and informing. I believe that there is insight to partnership in information-seeking in a scenario where there is no circulation desk creating a physical barrier between "librarians" and information seekers. There is an obvious wisdom to be gleaned from the concept of bringing the information to the field as opposed to idly standing by and waiting for the opportunity to field queries from a position far removed from the place in which information is most needed. Our archival team is archiving history in real-time, instead of trying to piece it back together in preservation of retrospect. The precedence here is that librarianship is now this dynamic and engaging vocation that is changing even faster than current professionals believe. The people we serve are redefining us and demanding that we assume our roles as beacons of intellectual freedom and the physical embodiment of American democracy that our education tells us we are. Pertinent to the people in this room, something proven to be most confronting, and a prime example of the ways in which The People's Library is challenging present structures, is that their resident pre-professional, who is the designated student outreach appointee speaking as a guest at library schools nation wide, is not enrolled in a Master's program at all, he's an undergraduate obtaining his bachelor of science in information and library services through a degree offering at the University of Maine at Augusta; a statement whose reception I've had run the gamut from an unanticipated hug, to even further unanticipated outright hostility.
What I'm trying to say is that this is such an exciting time to be involved in librarianship. We are existing in a generational instance laden with economic turmoil, burdened with recession and depression, yet people have risen to say that they love their books, they love their right to know, they love their librarians and (most importantly), they love their libraries and that's on us.. The moral of the story is that we shouldn't –we can't– let them down.
It was Jesse Shera, one of the foremost American library theoreticians of his or any generation, writing almost 50 years ago, who said, "The aim of librarianship, at whatever intellectual level it may operate, is to maximize the social utility of the graphic records, whether the patron served is an unlettered child absorbed in his first picture book or the most advanced scholar engaged in some esoteric inquiry." He goes on to say, "The storage and retrieval of information, of facts, however expertly done, are valueless if those facts are not used for the betterment of mankind."
At Occupy Wall Street, the People's Library evolved, as did the Biblioteca Acampada Sol in Madrid and the other Occupy libraries, because libraries are necessary to the betterment of humankind. As a profession, librarianship has had a long history as a liberating force in society. Going at least as far back as the working class Chartist movement in England, people seeking their own freedom have built libraries. Libraries offer universal access to recorded knowledge, they offer access to truth, they offer the intellectual means to liberation. That a library should sit at the center of a movement for American liberation, for a revolution in American politics and values is perfectly natural. Libraries, after all, are one of the few sites in American society where that uneasy, yet revolutionary, alliance between the working class and the intellectual class finds common ground.
Still though, why today, why now? Why has a collection of some 7,000 books managed to create such a stir. How have we come to a place where the sharing of books, the gathering and disseminating of knowledge, has come to be such a revolutionary act? One that brought the full force of the militarized New York police department down upon it. I think the reason is that today we see an all out assault on exactly what libraries stand for and what they do. Libraries are struggling today, not because our services and collections are no longer relevant, are no longer needed, (there is more than ample evidence proving the opposite) but because the very thing we stand for, the very thing we represent, is itself under assault. The idea of a common, of shared resources, of equal access–access not mediated by a market, but granted as a fundamental right, a right that all human beings share by the virtue of being a member of the human family– is under assault.
Libraries are valuable to society and promote the betterment of humankind because they serve as an intellectual and physical common, a shared collection and shared space that allows people to gather and educate themselves–to debate, discuss, and through the joint exercises of reading and conversation devise for themselves the kind of world they want to build and the way they want to build it.
In times like these, times when economics has been converted to a religion and leaders promote the doctrine of the free market as a panacea, librarianship is a radical profession. Unavoidably, our, profession is political, is radical. It's political because we stand at the juncture of people and knowledge, and knowledge is power. It is radical because people with access to knowledge and the means to understand it are a powerful people, they are a people who have the means to liberate themselves and to fight for their own freedom.
I see librarianship at a crossroads, we face a choice: do we continue down the road of unfettered markets constructing our relationships and communities or do we step back from that false vision and its unfulfilled promises of a golden future and fight for a different future, one based on our fundamental principles, on the idea that all people have value–that all people have inherent worth and dignity? Our country is facing multiple existential challenges–income inequality, climate change, economic catastrophe. We are living in a time when the future looks bleaker everyday.
But we have a choice. We can decide to shun cynicism and hopelessness. We can choose instead to look to our roots, to our radical role as supporters of equality and democracy, and work together within our institutions and cities and profession to carry our libraries into the future, not the techno-utopia often held out as the future, but a real future where we tackle our social problems through the provision of knowledge to all and by fiercely defending the common that we and those who came before us have worked so hard to build.
I joined the People's Library, I slept out at Zuccotti, in a fort built of boxes of books–of ideas, of stories, of hope, watched over by police wielding clubs and guns, to defend that common and for the opportunity to build a collection and a library based on the principles that I hold dear. I joined because building a library in times like these is an act of resistance and protest and hope and love.
On Monday, November 14, I went to Zuccotti after work to spend a few hours in the library, as I'd been doing almost every day since October 2– it was, basically, a second full-time job. That day I was there until 9 or 10 at night, and then went home to Brooklyn. At 11:30 I went to bed, looking forward to be getting almost enough sleep that night. Sleep is in chronic short supply at the Occupation.
At 12:53 am on the 15th, an hour and a half later, I got a text message from one of the half dozen live-in librarians, just saying, "Police are here." Unable to get back in touch with him or any other librarians on site, I called a friend from the jail support team who works overnights and I therefore knew would be awake. By ten after 1 he'd confirmed that it was for real this time. I rolled out of bed, put on my boots, and started calling and texting the other librarians while grabbing the day's necessities. I got on a train, and got to the financial district at 2 am.
Even making it in that quickly, I couldn't get within two or three blocks of the park. There were barricades and cops– whom Mayor Bloomberg has since called his "own army"– on every street. As we quickly learned, there was a general media blackout. Reporters were not allowed within sight or hearing of the park, supposedly for their 'safety,' which is belied by the fact that news helicopters were also grounded.
It hardly mattered what our emergency plan had been. Of the five librarians who were inside the park that night, two elected to stay, and the three others were only able to remove what they could carry in one trip; once they left the park they could not return to retrieve either personal possessions or library materials. Given that restriction, they carried out our emergency plan, which we'd devised after the city's previous attempt to remove us, admirably.
The two librarians who stayed ended up being beaten, pepper sprayed, and arrested with more than 150 other Occupiers. Those who were by computers at the time could see them retreat to the Kitchen, which was at the center of the park, as the livestreams and other social media stayed up as long as they could. Within a couple hours, the library, along with the rest of the camp, and been torn down, loaded into city Sanitation dump trucks, and carted away. In video from that night you can see tents being taken down with chainsaws.
As the sun came up, those of us still free gathered in Foley Square. Breakfast appeared from somewhere, the medics continued to clean people up, and working groups and friends tried to figure out who was missing. Around 8 am we heard that the park was cleared and we could go in. A couple of us walked back down, where we met up with a handful of other librarians. We put the books we had on our person back on the bench where the library been just a few hours earlier and declared the People's Library open once again. We were there only a half hour or so before the cops completely barricaded the place off and kicked us all out. For the rest of the day, the park was closed off like that, the mayor and the police department directly ignoring a court order to allow the people access to the park.
When we finally were allowed back, under heavy security, we set up the library over and over. Those actions have resulted in additional confiscation of books and threats of further arrests. The rules under which police and security have allowed us to operate shift constantly. Aside from the library as place, we've taken it mobile, for our own actions as well as in support of other groups' actions.
During the days after the Occupation's eviction, Library recovered what we could from the city. That amounted to very little, as Zachary will tell you. We demanded restitution and apologies from the city, which were not forthcoming. We are now pursuing legal action, which will take time, and we will certainly keep the library community up to date with as things happen. Our librarians who were arrested that night have just had their first court appearances, but this, too, will take time. In the meantime, we are doing our best to continue providing library services in support of the movement.
Shortly after the raid the Mayor's office sent out a picture via twitter of some books on a table, saying that the People's library was safe, and that we would be able to go recover it. It was a small picture, hardly panoramic, but it was obvious that the books in the picture were far less than what was taken. Still, we were hopeful that there were just more books off camera. When they finally let out information about recovering materials members of the work group rushed to get back the books. Librarians went to the specified sanitation garage with a print out of the catalog, ready to recover everything that was lost. What was lost? Our tent, our shelves, tables, chairs, bins, archival materials, laptops, miscellaneous office supplies, oh, and around 4,000 books.
What was waiting at sanitation was…a few broken bins filled with books, a severely broken chair, and a folding table. The materials were taken back to a safe storage location, and then I began to sort them. I'm a librarian, but my focus in library school was actually archiving. I've done preservation assessments before, and before I went to storage I looked over my notes on conducting such assessments. I went in ready to triage 4,000 books. There weren't 4,000 books.
There were 1,275 books. I divided these into three categories. Fine, the books that were not damaged, or just lightly so – these were books that could easily be circulated. Damaged but reusable, for books that had taken a beating but which could still be re-read, this was the qualifier for books that had ripped covers, heavy spine damage, light water damage, or some other malady that nevertheless did not keep them from being readable. And then there were the destroyed, books ripped in half, books that had been warped beyond readability, and books that were more mud than book. The break down of this was 579 were fine, 389 were damaged but reusable, and 308 were destroyed. But that's not where this story ends. Earlier, when I discussed the collection I mentioned that we would mark all of the books so that we knew they were ours…and I was coming across a lot of books that weren't marked. I also found a lot of journals…and a broken kindle. Sanitation, it seems, didn't just give us the library books. They gave us every book they found. And thus I re-sorted and re-ran the numbers. It turned out that 272 of the books we got back were not actually library books. Meaning we got back 1,003 library books – about a fourth of what was taken the break down of those books was that 504 were fine, 298 were damaged but reusable, and 201 are destroyed.
Personally, I hope that Mayor Bloomberg just wanted to do a lot of reading– as all but two books from the reference collection vanished– he certainly got an interesting selection. But, I kind of doubt that's the case.
One of the primary characteristics of our library is its fluidity. Every day we re-invent ourselves. What we're doing right now at the People's Library is streamlining our mobile library project and finding interim physical space for the collection. We are building alliances across the Occupy movement, with educational institutions, and strengthening our ties with allies in public and academic libraries. Books are being published about the Occupy movement, professors are teaching courses on it, and students are studying what we have already done. We mean to be an integral part of these conversations.
What I see in the future is another physical occupation, re-establishing the commons. Over the winter we're strengthening our roots. We are empowering the decentralized network of people and institutions who are committed to realizing social and economic justice, addressing climate reality and confronting the host of other issues we've gathered to address. Together we are willing and able to take our power and insist on necessary, revolutionary change. Join us.
Despite "the protester" being named the person of the year by Time Magazine (and the article containing a reference to the people's library), the People's Library found itself ranked quite differently by another publication. The Village Voice put together a list of the 100 most powerless New Yorkers – yes, powerless. "The Librarians of the Occupy Wall Street "People's Library"" came in 34th. Here's what the voice had to say about us "One of the most fun aspects of Zuccotti Park this fall was the "People's Library" a wide selection of books that sparked free-wheeling discussions. Volunteer librarians (like Bill Scott [who was on the cover]) guarded it with professional care. Although they protected it from Mayor Bloomberg's first threatened raid on the park (by taking the books away via Zipcar to an "undisclosed location"), the librarians were rendered utterly powerless after the city launched its surprise raid and returned the collection looking like shit."
It's always an odd feeling to see yourself called one of the 100 most powerless people, just as it's odd to see a magazine like Time declare the protestor to be the person of the year. But what's really odd, isn't that the People's Library came in 34th (though it's worth noting that "The Occupy Wall Street Crust Punks" came in 40th [and if you've ever listened to crust punk music you know that calling a crust punk powerless is like calling a chainsaw a feather duster, but I digress]), it's who came in 13th. Any guesses? The 13th most powerless person/institution in NYC: "The NYPL's Librarians," of whom the Voice said:
Perhaps the only people less powerful in the library system than the homeless patrons are the librarians themselves. Gone are the days when a master's degree in library science and a job in the nations largest public-library system meant that you would spend your days helping writers to research and mesmerizing people with your encyclopedic knowledge of the Dewey decimal system. Today's NYPL librarian needs to be a social worker, a specialist at dealing with the homeless and the severely mentally ill, a computer tech wiz at solving people's Wi-Fi problems and a job (and suicide-prevention) counselor helping people look for jobs that simply don't exist.Even those librarians at the flagship Fifth Avenue main branch (who have been inoculated to some degree form the shit storm of the branch libraries) are preparing for it. As a recent article in the Nation reported, the 3 millions books beneath the Rose Reading Room will soon be shipped off to a storage facility in New Jersey and replaced by seven floors of computer terminals. As a former NYPL librarian said of the branch across the street and the main branch's future: "That place is utter chaos. And it will all come here – the noise, the teenage problems, the circulating DVDs.
It seems like the Village Voice wants to give the impression that being a librarian in NYC is to consign yourself to being powerless.
Luckily this is only relevant to NYC. Right? Surely, nobody could say this of librarians in Chicago? Or, California? What about in Michigan? How about Missouri? It's getting tough out there for librarians. Powerless? It certainly seems that way. But even as librarians have fought, and rallied, they have still seen library hours reduced, budgets cut, and so forth. And it doesn't look like those attacks are stopping, no matter how many hours our read-ins last, or no matter how many people we get to hug the library. Heck, the "library" section on The Huffington Post is actually called "Libraries in Crisis."
After the raid on the park, we heard from many people who were horrified by what had happened. And, honestly, it was pretty horrifying. But let's be honest, libraries were under attack by Mayors before the People's Library, and they will be after. Bloomberg was cutting the New York library budget's before, and he'll probably do it again in his coming budget. Rahm Emanuel in Chicago…the same. The discussion around libraries these days seems to be about cuts, and about whether or not libraries are relevant in today's world. Librarians – who frequently find themselves in the ranks of those evil "public service workers" – are regularly under assault, and thus it is understandable if a feeling of powerlessness can begin to sink in.
I don't agree with the Village Voice's placement of the people's library at 34. Were we technically powerless to stop Bloomberg's "private army" from tossing the books in the dumpster; yes. But the library is much more than that, the movement is much more than that, and in the end they're the ones powerless to stop it.
Powerlessness is what happens when you sit behind your desk and do nothing. Powerlessness is signing an online petition, or commenting on an article, or forwarding an e-mail. Powerlessness is doing nothing. And I can honestly say that the moment's in my professional life when I feel the least powerless, occur when I'm doing OWS library work.


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Last night in the NFC championship, the San Francisco 49ers trailed the Seattle Seahawks by six, 23-17, with 30 seconds left in the game. Quarterback Colin Kaepernick had led the 49ers all the way down to the Seahawks' 18-yard line. He took the snap out of the gun, set his feet, and released a flossy little fade to the corner of the end zone, where receiver Michael Crabtree had his hands out. And then Richard Sherman happened.
Sherman, a 6-foot-3 physical marvel and the current best cornerback in the NFL, leaped with Crabtree, and falling backward toward the rear of the end zone, he tipped the pass with his left hand back inbounds to a teammate and ended the 49ers season.
It was a spectacular play, a historic play, the kind of play we'll be seeing on NFL playoff ads in five, 10, 20 years, when the name Richard Sherman dances on the tip of our tongues, just out of reach, and the memory of this year's conference championship is clouded and composited with the memories of playoff matchups to come.
But we're not talking about that play today. Instead, we're talking about what happened right after the play, when reporter Erin Andrews found Richard Sherman in the postgame scrum just seconds after the final buzzer. Because what happened next was absolutely epic.
When Erin Andrews asked Sherman to rehash the play, the cornerback instead barked out: "I'm the best corner in the game. When you try me with a sorry receiver like Crabtree, that's the result you're gonna get! Don't you ever talk about me!" Then he glared directly into the camera.
It was so powerful, so raw of a reaction that Andrews needed a moment before proceeding. The league's best cornerback had made the best move of his career on the biggest play of his career to win the biggest game of his career, against an opposing wide receiver and college head coach with whom he shares not a little bad blood. This was a triumphant moment, and still to a lot of people there was something viscerally ugly about Sherman standing over a pretty blonde woman, yelling into our living rooms with an emotional mixture of joy, relief, and excitement, arrogance, and anger. Dude was turnt up.
Millions of Americans took to their cell phones, to social media, to the bar patron next to them, to cluck at Sherman. We called him classless, a bad sportsman, a troll. We called him a monkey and a nigger. We threatened his life. We said that he set black people and race relations back 30, 50, 100 years.
Because in that moment, Sherman—a singular kid from Compton who won both the athletic and intellectual lottery so completely, so authoritatively, that he spent three years playing on Stanford's football team at wide receiver before converting to defensive back and becoming the NFL's best at the position—was in the public eye. In that moment, whether he knew, cared, or neither, Richard Sherman, a public figure, became a proxy for the black male id.
When you're a public figure, there are rules. Here's one: A public personality can be black, talented, or arrogant, but he can't be any more than two of these traits at a time. It's why antics and soundbites from guys like Brett Favre, Johnny Football and Bryce Harper seem almost hyper-American, capable of capturing the country's imagination, but black superstars like Sherman, Floyd Mayweather, and Cam Newton are seen as polarizing, as selfish, as glory boys, as distasteful and perhaps offensive. It's why we recoil at Kanye West's rants, like when West, one of the greatest musical minds of our generation, had the audacity to publicly declare himself a genius (was this up for debate?), and partly why, over the six years of Barack Obama's presidency, a noisy, obstreperous wing of the GOP has seemed perpetually on the cusp of calling him "uppity." Barry Bonds at his peak was black, talented, and arrogant; he was a problem for America. Joe Louis was black, talented, and at least outwardly humble; he was "a credit to his race, the human race," as Jimmy Cannon once wrote.
All this is based on the common, very American belief that black males must know their place, and more tellingly, that their place is somewhere different than that of whites. It's been etched into our cultural fabric that to act as anything but a loud, yet harmless buffoon or an immensely powerful, yet humble servant is overstepping. It's uppity. It is, to use Knapp's word, petrifying.
The problem is that it's not just white folks who feel this way. Last night, Golden State Warriors wingman Andre Iguodala received nearly 3,000 retweets from this:
The problem is that too many people think that Iguodala has a point. Too many of us think that one ecstatic, triumphant black man showing honest, human emotion just seconds after making a play that very well could be written into the first appositive of his obituary, is not only offensive, but is also representative of the tens of millions of blacks in this country. And in two weeks time, in the year 2014, too many of us will be rooting for the Denver Broncos for no other reason than to knock Richard Sherman down a few notches, if only to put him back in his place.

subset: commoncrawl


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5 Responses to "The Gendered Situation of Chess"
July 10, 2009 at 5:21 am
Pretty cool post. I just came by your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed browsing your posts.
Any way I'll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you post again soon!
July 11, 2009 at 5:25 am
This study is informative, and shows stereotypes play a role in female chess performance.
However, the paper does not establish what is claimed in the abstract: that "…gender stereotypes are mainly responsible for the underperformance of women in chess."
I'll walk you through why it doesn't, and hopefully my example will clear up some misinterpretations of stereotype threat discussed elsewhere by Paul Sackett.
We have to take a look at the experimental design, and the issues are a little delicate, but my critique of the Maass claim will take the form of a reductio ad absurdum.
Suppose that instead of comparing women and men at chess, Anne Maass decides her next project will be to compare men and computers.
Computers can be built to outperform even the top men, but suppose Maass thinks this is just due to social psychology, in that a man facing a computer gets nervous from the fact that his opponent has orders of magnitude more processing power, and consequently the man often melts under pressure, so that maybe if Gary Kasparov thought he was playing Jack Taylor instead of IBM's Deep Blue then he would have been victorious.
Now, suppose for the sake of argument that IBM has built a whole army of chess computers, which are generally better than men, but have a certain amount of variation in their abilities. Maass thus begins her new experiment comparing men and computers, similar in design to her current experiment comparing women and men.
Step 1: Maass matches each man in her sample with a computer of equal chess ability.
Step 2: Maass divides the man/computer pairs into two groups. There is a control group where men think they're playing against other men and an experimental group where men are truthfully told that they're playing against computers.
In the control group where men think they're playing men, the matching by ability means we should expect men to do about as well as their inanimate opponents. So suppose this happens.
In the experimental group where men are told they're playing computers, it might be entirely reasonable to expect men to get nervous and perform worse than their silicon doppelgangers. So again, suppose this is what happens.
But now suppose Masse publishes that stereotypes are "…mainly responsible for the underperformance" of men against computers. This conclusion cannot follow from the (hypothetical, albeit expected) results, because the computers were designed by IBM to be much better (on average) than men. Even with a gigantic difference in average abilities, the matching means men should play about as well as computers in the control group, so this occurrence wouldn't be at all surprising. While the computer versus human results would show stereotypes can impact performance, they of course couldn't imply that stereotypes are mainly responsible for the gap between humans and computers, since the conclusion would be false. There could still be a large between between the average man and average computer, even when the men are falsely told they are playing other men.
Similar incorrect interpretations are often found in the stereotype threat literature for ethnic group differences in standardized tests, but instead of matched designs these studies instead usually use statistical adjustments for subjects' previous SAT scores.
Look carefully before declaring checkmate!
July 16, 2009 at 9:24 pm
It would be extremely interesting to repeat the experiment and substitute knowledge of the other player's *chess rating* in place of knowledge about their gender.
July 17, 2009 at 11:56 am
And interesting study, and I'd be even more interested if it had actual data rather than the anecdotes that make up its sample size.
Three experiments among 42 players? Were observations made among one game, or three? Even if there were three sets of 21 games, I give even money that the observed difference is caused by chance.
I'd be interested in seeing the sample repeated with 100 players, each playing six games – two controlled, two (correctly) knowing the gender, and two (incorrectly) knowing the gender – without playing the same opponent more than once.
July 20, 2009 at 2:47 pm
very informative and analytical post in nature. I quite appreciate the thought expressed. Thanks for sharing and keep up the good work.


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Jez's WWE #83 and Reflections #10 Challenges
Posted byRussell SmithPosted inanimals, Challenges, waterTags:Coy pond, Water Water Everywhere, WWE
Published by Russell Smith
I was born at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. I find inspiration in the lives of so many people from Joan of Arc to Oscar Wilde. While my primary avocation is photography, I also enjoy philosophy, theology and most of all, history. My beloved wife, Robin Anne Smith, who passed away in 2013 is an inspiration to me. My beloved partner, Dana is also a great support and inspiration to me. I'd be remiss if I did not mention my cats: Maxwell, Nigel, Pirouette and GarGar. View more posts


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'Aviana' Cushion Cut Alexandrite Gold Floral Bridal Set
$1,015 – $1,931
A cushion cut centre with a beautiful floral band
Payment plans available
Choose from 10k, 14k or 18k
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Side stones
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Custom made please allow 10 – 20 business days for manufacture
Rings can be customised – please see our design your own page
CREATED STONESCreated stones – these are not natural earthed diamonds which are very expensive. SWAROVSKI Gemstones™ is a leader in producing synthetic gemstones that possess a very natural beauty. The stones are laboratory made from zirconium dioxide – cz base, that boast fine colour, no colour mixing, and a superb cut, which result in a beautiful duplication of nature. 100% conflict free stones. These are not carbon stones these are a cz created stones and are very hard, heat resistant, and reflect light just like a diamond.
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3 years, 11 months ago
Walk. An intervention in public space.
We have been thoroughly interested in the urban space and the possibilities of its decolonization fr...
3 years, 11 months ago
Donald Weber writes about photography as a discipline, profession and practice, which still has a long journey to make for to be able to think the conditions of its own production. This work is part of a larger body of work Donald and I are developing, one day it will be a book. A next text related to the ideas Donald is talking about here is in the making. Highly recommended reading!
3 years, 11 months ago
"@Bernadette- you mean from 'Global Liberal Media" into "Democratic Media"?..."
3 years, 11 months ago
"Thanks for this SanFrancisco- if you have any more examples on Culture Jamming coming from Argentina..."
3 years, 11 months ago
The Baffler on Spotify and how its main value for brands and advertisers is to know really a lot about our emotional states via their mood based playlists.
3 years, 12 months ago
Global Liberal Media Please
We have lately again become interested into Culture Jamming, a practice we have been very involved i...
4 years ago
There is several reasons I am posting this. First, it is time to bring this wonderful text, the original text by Mark Dery, which first theorized the term Culture Jamming - in fact Dery has coined the term- to you.
So here is: Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs
I find the concept of Culture jamming still very useful, although the practice of CJ was in the last two decades abused, coopted, critiqued for being just an empty fashion etc. I always thought that in order to do it well, Culture Jamming needs superb understanding of communication, design and art in relation to meaning making in our media, well in the world.
Now, the media has changed and changed again, and the question is how is Culture jamming useful in the current social media, surveillance driven media sphere. But it is and even if we engage just in the visual graphic part, it can do "something".
So what can it do today, I am asking you? And this is what I aim to start figuring out more with my master of communication design students here at RMIT. As part of a set of semiotic strategies, named Re:Coding we will look into that. But I would need your help- what are good examples of CJ, what are good CURRENT examples of CJ? How would you run a project on CJ with students?
Here is a video of one that I love from our friend Vladimir Turner, and the whole project is here:
Any ideas and examples would be welcome.
4 years, 1 month ago
What great memories! Culture jamming 2002, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Perhaps the first culture jamming action in Slovenia- in a night action we jammed a national campaign on the importance of brands and branding. Big Slovenian brands had billboards all over in order to promote the value of brands and the importance of buying well known brands.
We used a stencil and jammed billboards on major crossroads or other prominent locations. This was in the middle of the process for the first Memefest and in no minor way we were influenced by the Culture Jamming concepts and culture in thinking about our first festival. Especially No Logo by Naomi Klein and the Adbusters magazine were important at that time.
4 years, 2 months ago
This is such a cool text: 101 Ways to Play With the Mainstream, Culture Jamming as subversive recreation, by Tom Liacas.
Written at the height of the popularity of Culture jamming it is highly relevant as it speaks from within the very cultures that created the phenomenon. Still now, CJ is a widely used practice and in my opinion should be taught, perhaps under the banner "Re-Coding" to students. To be a good Jammer means to be a super good communicator/ designer/ media manipulator. Its much more difficult that it seams, but most of all, it really is fun.
Check it out, I have given it to read to some of my students for their research project in the masters of communication design.
4 years, 1 month ago
Hey here is my new paper that is just published and available on the link bellow:
Extradisciplinary risk-taking: Design education as institutional critique
Abstract: Risk in education in the creative field of communication design is usually seen in connection with creativity as subjective expression and innovation as desired impact. This article positions risk in relation to the political in design education. It puts forward the argument that a particular type of risk-taking in education can work towards shifting design from a position of a service-providing activity towards a more emancipated practice, which would not comply with the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. To counter the current state of compliance this article suggests a three-level model of extradisciplinary risk-taking as institutional critique. The case of Memefest and Design Futures is discussed. Theoretical analysis is combined with (auto) ethnography and qualitative research.
Image by my friend Sandy Kaltenborn (www.image-shift.net)
If you cant access the paper online because your institution cant afford to pay for the journal subscription or because you are not an academic and cant access this or for what ever reason write to me: oliver AT memefest.org
Of course I would appreciate any of your thoughts and comments!
4 years, 3 months ago
You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook.
Wall Street Journal testing reveals how the social-media giant collects a wide range of private data from developers; 'This is a big mess'
"The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure, the testing showed."
You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook.
Wall Street Journal testing reveals how the social-media giant collects a wide range of private data from developers; 'This is a big mess'
"The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure, the testing showed."
4 years, 3 months ago
A must read!
"The heavy atoms in cameras will continue to be replaced with bits of weightless software, shrinking them down to microscopic dots scanning the environment 24 hours a day. The mirrorworld will be a world governed by light rays zipping around, coming into cameras, leaving displays, entering eyes, a never-ending stream of photons painting forms that we walk through and visible ghosts that we touch. The laws of light will govern what is possible.
New technologies bestow new superpowers. We gained super speed with jet planes, super healing powers with antibiotics, super hearing with the radio. The mirrorworld promises super vision. We'll have a type of x-ray vision able to see into objects via their virtual ghosts, exploding them into constituent parts, able to untangle their circuits visually. Just as past generations gained textual literacy in school, learning how to master the written word, from alphabets to indexes, the next generation will master visual literacy. A properly educated person will be able to create a 3D image inside of a 3D landscape nearly as fast as one can type today. They will know how to search all videos ever made for the visual idea they have in their head, without needing words. The complexities of color and the rules of perspective will be commonly understood, like the rules of grammar. It will be the Photonic Era."
4 years, 3 months ago
The Situationist Times and some thoughts on Memefest publishing
The Situationists had an immense influence on Memefest from its very beginnings in 2002. The concept...
4 years, 3 months ago
Listen to the new episode of Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, here in conversation with Geert Lovink.
Playing for Team Human today: media activist and scholar Geert Lovink. Geert will be helping us see how an understanding of the political economy is not enough. We have to reacquaint ourselves with the experiential layer of our humanity and even reclaim our sadness to counter the stultifying effects of platform capitalism. Today, when our sources of information are intimately intertwined with our social lives, it's not as simple as just "going offline." How can we overcome the anti-human agendas embedded in our technology?
Today's show reaches back to the origins of what became known as "tactical media" — using interactive media to promote the human agenda. Geert makes the case for reawakening this sensibility. You can learn more about Geert at networkedcultures.org and discover his forthcoming book Sad By Design: On Platform Nihilism.
4 years, 4 months ago
"In the latest study measuring the effects of social media on a person's life, researchers at New York University and Stanford University found that deactivating Facebook for just four weeks could alter people's behavior and state of mind. The study found that temporarily quitting Facebook led people to spend more time offline, watching TV and socializing with family and friends; reduced their knowledge of current events and polarization of policy views; and provoked a small but significant improvement in people's self-reported happiness and satisfaction with their lives.
What's more, the researchers found that the deactivation freed up on average an hour per day for participants. And the people who took a break from Facebook continued to use the platform less often, even after the experiment ended.
"Our study offers the largest-scale experimental evidence available to date on the way Facebook affects a range of individual and social welfare measures," the researchers wrote. "
4 years, 4 months ago
'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff's new book is a chilling exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world. Observer tech columnist John Naughton explains the importance of Zuboff's work and asks the author 10 key questions
4 years, 4 months ago
Sad by design
While classical melancholy was defined by isolation and introspection, today's tristesse plays out amidst busy social media interactions. Geert Lovink on 'technological sadness' – the default mental state of the online billions.
4 years, 4 months ago
Douglas Rushkoff
The real value of Facebook
Thinking Outside the Black Box
What the algorithms can't see may be the most human thing about us
4 years, 5 months ago
Food Democracy is sold out!
Food democracy is sold out and is now being reprinted. The only change will be a slightly thicker co...
4 years, 5 months ago
"Our main interest in this analysis is to try to explore some of the forms and methods of interventions that different political actors or power structures can use to control and conquer online sphere. Here we will mostly speak about hidden, indirect actions, interventions done by the unknown actors, individuals with hidden or fake identities, companies without visible ties to government officials, political troll armies and troll lords, or even "artificial" entities.
As usual in our investigations we will try to quantify and visualise some of those forms and try to detect and understand some patterns."
Troels Primdahl
Birth year
Choreographer, Performer & Interdisciplinary Artistic Director


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not sure what is up with me, but I am much more emotional today. I think it has to do with all the testing and still my worry over the tumor marker going up. I have cried non-stop. Sometimes it's a sad cry….sometimes it's a just because cry.
What it boils down too is everyday brings new feeelings and emotions and today I had all of them. I am very sore from my shot (makes all your joints and bones hurt) and that't not helping. I'm also in St. Louis and miss John.
Hopefully tomorrow is a new day with a new perspective. Today I had a pity party and a why me??? moment. I hope tomorrow is different. I've said before that once you are diagnosed with cancer your whole world stops. Today, that's how I felt.
But, by the gift of God I will wake up tomorrow and try to do/be better. I promise. 🙂


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This is a series highlighting folks who identify as Radical Doulas. Are you interested in being part of the series? Go here to provide your responses to the profile questions and I'll include you!
I'm really excited about this week's Radical Doula, because I had the pleasure of working with Poonam when she was part of the leadership circle of the NYC-based Doula Project. Poonam is an incredibly warm person, an fabulous doula, and a dedicated social justice leader.
Poonam Dreyfus-Pai is a researcher, advocate, and full-spectrum doula. She is the co-director of the Bay Area Doula Project, and came to the organization after volunteering for 2 years as an abortion doula with its sister NYC-based organization, The Doula Project. She is currently a graduate student in the concurrent MPH/MSW program at UC Berkeley, with concentrations in Maternal and Child Health, and Management and Planning of Social Welfare Services. Since February 2012, she has been an intern in the Sea Change program at ANSIRH (of UCSF's Bixby Center), where she researches women's disclosures of pregnancy experiences and abortion stigma. Poonam is grateful to be a part of the Bay Area's vast network of organizations dedicated to reproductive justice. She works to cultivate a social environment that is supportive of all people's sexual health choices and experiences, and is honored to continue her work as a full-spectrum doula with the BADP. Check out the BADP here.
What inspired you to become a doula?
I didn't known anything about doulas until I came across The Doula Project (then The Abortion Doula Project) in late 2008. When I learned about the support that doulas offer in birth, it seemed obvious and natural to extend that compassionate, continuous presence to people having abortions. I was excited about the possibility of being that supportive presence, and of bearing witness to people's strength and wisdom during their abortion experiences. Joining The Doula Project in 2009 opened me up to the amazing world of full-spectrum doulas, and remains one of the best decisions I have ever made.
Why do you identify with the term radical doula?
"Radical" work, to me, means work that is built around justice and inclusivity. I think of radical doulas as working to expand the system, to help all people have empowered and supported pregnancy experiences, regardless of pregnancy outcome, individual income, immigrant status, incarceration status, language capacity, gender, etc — the list is endless. My work as a full-spectrum doula feels radical and transformative because in each individual act as a doula, I am helping people understand that they deserve to be met with compassion, and to receive the highest quality of care, regardless of where they land on the spectrum of pregnancy. We are not only bearing witness to people's pregnancy experiences; we are learning from their stories. We are creating changes in how people think of these experiences and how they see themselves as empowered agents within them.
What is your doula philosophy and how does it fit into your broader political beliefs?
What I find so incredible about full-spectrum work is its potential to break down stigma. Stigma and silence exist across all pregnancy experiences, and there are so many niche services that exist out there to provide support: for people choosing adoption, people who have miscarried or experienced fetal loss, people who've experience adverse birth experiences, and people who have had abortions. The work that these organizations do on a regular basis is amazing and vital, but I would love to see this care taken one step further. If we can recognize that a person may experience many different pregnancy outcomes throughout one lifetime, then why should these services be separated or different from one another? Why can't people expect the same quality of care from the same support providers each time they experience a pregnancy? When we treat these experiences as though they are not related or relevant to one another, we (consciously or not) create hierarchies, signifying that some experiences are more important and/or more deserving of support than others. Full-spectrum doulas work to eliminate the silos that exist around these experiences, and bring them together under one umbrella. I see this work as vital to changing our reproductive health culture, and want it to be replicated, not just through the ever-expanding network of full-spectrum organizations (whoo hoo!), but among all health care providers.
What is your favorite thing about being a doula?
Working directly with people having abortions, hearing their stories, holding their hands, simply being with them during this incredibly personal moment in their lives — this has always at the top of the list. These days, though, I am also becoming more and more psyched about building a full-spectrum community, both in the Bay Area and nationally. I have been really lucky to have worked with the Bay Area Doula Project since I moved to Berkeley in August 2011: it is an organization of committed, innovative, and energetic doulas, who are constantly bringing new insight and ideas to the table. I am inspired by them and grateful to them — they have made co-leading the BADP a really fantastic experience. I am so excited for all the new projects we have in store for 2013.
If you could change one thing about birth, what would it be?
I came to this work on a slightly different trajectory than most of the doulas I know, having started with abortion work and only recently picking up birth work. As such, I'll talk about abortion rather than birth, since this is where most of my experience has been. I would love to see abortion support as something that doesn't just get afforded to clinic patients who seem more "emotional." I would love it to go from being "something extra" to something integral to the abortion experience. I think the Bay Area has pretty a high quality of abortion care, but, even here, there is this pervasive idea that doulas aren't necessary for most women. It really undermines all the potential benefits doulas can provide to all people having abortions. Research is showing that what people want in a clinic experience is better pain management and a more supportive clinic environment, and these are things that doulas are uniquely qualified to provide. Just as we say that all people deserve birth doulas, and can benefit from them, so, too, can all people benefit from abortion doulas. And if we keep pushing forward, I believe that this change can happen.


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The 27-year-old former child star was arrested Thursday evening, after building officials at her midtown apartment called police to complain she was rolling a joint and smoking pot in the lobby.
The officers went to her apartment where they said they saw heavy smoke and a bong sitting on the kitchen counter. They said she tossed the bong out the window in front of them, prosecutors said.
She then said to police: "It was just a vase," according to Manhattan assistant district attorney Chikaelo Ibeabuchi.
"My client completely denies illegally throwing anything out of her window," said Andrew Friedman, her attorney for the arraignment.
The judge released her on her own recognizance and gave her a July 9 court date.
Thursday, Bynes was held overnight at a police precinct. She pulled up to court Friday morning in a squad car where she was greeted by a crush of media. She was also charged with attempted tampering with evidence and unlawful possession of marijuana, all misdemeanors.
"I'm asking you I don't want any pictures," she said to a photographer.
"I don't want any photos. No press are allowed in here," she announced to the public courtroom.
Bynes rose to fame starring in Nickelodeon's "All That" and has also starred in several films, including 2010's "Easy A." But she has been in the news more recently because of several scrapes with the law and bizarre public behavior.
Her lawyer said she had no record in New York, but the judge noted she had several out-of-state cases. In California in December, the former "Hairspray" star resolved a misdemeanor hit-and-run case after entering into a civil settlement with other drivers.
Also in California, she was charged last fall with driving on a suspended license after it was temporarily taken away from her after two hit-and-run cases where she was accused of leaving the scene without providing proper information. She has also pleaded not guilty to drunken driving in a separate case.
In releasing her, Chief New York County Judge Neil Ross gave her a stern warning not to make trouble or miss any court dates.
"I do want to make sure you understand," he said. "If you get arrested again ... I'm going to be setting very, very significant bail."
"OK," she replied.
"You're in a very, very challenging situation right now," he said.
Assistant district attorney Ibeabuchi had asked for $1,000 bail. He said no bong was recovered from the street below -- a sign, her attorney said, that Bynes was telling the truth.
"There was nothing recovered from the sidewalk, clearly a search was made for the bag," said Friedman of the New York County Defender Services. He said she was followed illegally into her apartment and has made a complaint about police wrongfully entering.
As the judge dispensed with her case, she said, "Thank you sir, have a nice day."
The star then got into a waiting yellow cab ringed with photographers and TV cameras and left.
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